Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

AffidavitDonda writes with news that University of Warwick and University of British Columbia researchers have "identified the gene for breaking down lignin in a soil-living bacterium called Rhodococcus jostii. Although such enzymes have been found before in fungi, this is the first time that they have been identified in bacteria. The bacterium's genome has already been sequenced which means that it could be modified more easily to produce large amounts of the required enzyme. In addition, bacteria are quick and easy to grow, so this research raises the prospect of producing enzymes which can break down lignin on an industrial scale. By making woody plants and the inedible by-products of crops economically viable the eventual hope is to be able to produce biofuels that don't compete with food production."

Do you know how quick and easy to grow softwood forests are? There's a few hundred acres that I planted when I was at school that are just about ready to harvest; longest payoff for a summer job *ever*.

Sure, any day now, I'm sure it will be a commercial product, like all the other wonderful biofuel, battery, solar and other technologies being trumpeted daily all over the place. There's always a gotcha, like, "It doesn't work." Or, "It costs 3 times as much as anything else."

Maybe [nih.gov]. Sort of [annualreviews.org]. Perhaps. I had thought so as well, but a quick Google search indicates that those bugs are not well characterized. Having a single organism with a defined enzyme is obviously an easier system to scale up than the stomach of an insect.

they were well characterized, in the 1970s when oil embargo caused huge interest in alternate energy including plant matter conversion to biofuel. And no, you don't get a link since most human knowledge is NOT on the internet (try your local University library instead).. Being nearly 50, I'm amazed at the "new discoveries" that are repeats of the same shit, different decade.

Like this [asm.org] or this [sgmjournals.org]? Nearly every major historic scientific publication can be found on the internet nowadays. Biology is not my area though, so I will not try to dig deeper in this.

What do you mean? This sounds interesting. In my area everything seems to be published in these journals, some things from industry only in patents, or it is not published at all. Ok some information could be found in old PhD thesises, which could only be found at the university where they were published. Are there other sources?

the trouble with that bacteria is that it requires a strange growth environment, one not easily reproducible on an agar plate.

honestly, inability to reproduce growth in isolation has severely limited our ability as biologists to isolate and sequence the greater part of bacteria and fungi. some estimates put our thorough knowledge of bacteria at less than 5% of the species out there. We have barely scratched the surface of genome sequences just due to our limitations in labs.

So what will be left from crop harvests to fold back into the soil and preserve some bare shred of soil fertility if we even harvest the "inedible by-products"? Why do people overlook soil in the lifecycle? Soil contains chemicals, which plants take up and use to construct themselves; if you remove the entire plant and don't fold something truly equivalent back into the soil, then over time the soil becomes depleted of chemicals needed to sustain the process.

I've always wondered about this. I garden at home, and in the fall I gather the bags of leaves that neighbors set out to put in my compost pile. Why they would just throw away perfectly good biodegradable material and then turn around and buy bags of gardening soil is beyond me. The symbol of Lebanon is the Cedar tree. Do we associate forests with Lebanon or just a dried-out desert? They lost their soil's fertility and can't get it back.

I can't speak for the large operations, but on the small (thousand-ish) acre farm where I grew up we baled cornstalks just like hay or straw. The big cornstalk bales are piled off to the side where they are used as animal bedding (either in the feedlot sheds or pushed around in the fields for the roaming herds). It gives the animals a warm comfortable place to sleep, mostly just during the winter. Once it thaws or becomes too messy the shed is cleaned into a manure spreader, and flung onto fields that need it (either visibly or based on a soil analysis). Generally this results in the poo+cornstalks being plowed back in at the start of spring.

I know its not popular on here, but there is a point at which you just have to accept that humans change their environment, and there will be casualties. Rather than wasting a bunch of money fighting and regulating every industry on the planet, its probably more realistic to regulate enough to make the environment safe for people and buy separate reserves to set aside for animal habitat. Its not a solution I like either, but turning back the clock on over a hundred years of industrial progress just isn't going to happen.

Not to mention there is a law of diminishing returns on farm regulation: past a certain point, regulation make small scale farming infeasible. But large scale farms are far and away more likely to use "unfriendly" farming methods, largely because the connection to the land isn't there. If you over regulate (and its already happening) small farmers who are likely to care about the land get bought out by superfarms. Superfarms typically don't care about sustainability or the landscape. Two farms near us recently went under, and when they were purchased all the wooded areas that had been used for grazing were chopped and plowed under. The regulations that were supposed to help protect wildlife ended up doing tremendous harm.

Another example is Monarch Butterflies. Monarchs feed exclusively on milkweed, and the best place to find milkweed as I grew up was on fence lines (typically between cow-pastures). As farms merge and pasture is being plowed in favor of large straight fields that giant farm implements can drive easily, these areas are vanishing (the idea that the price of corn is diving these changes isn't entirely true, the fact is that even if corn was dirt cheap its more cost effective for a large farm to grow it in giant straight fields with giant implements). Not surprisingly, experts are now worried about declining Monarch populations. Food for thought, I hope.

Um we don't take the whole plant. We take as much of the energy as possible.For example in biogas production you get gas(mostly the CH4 we want) and the liquid/solid remains wich are then used as fertilizer. A better fertilizer (and less smelly) than the untreated plantsor waste products themself. The problem with lignin is that it contains energy we can not get at in an efficient manner, the right enzymes could change that.When you burn wood you get out the energy in the form of fire, but you still get ash

I don't agree that process is sustainable. You think that what's removed is trivial and unimportant to sustainability and long-term - multi-generational - soil fertility, and I disagree; I think it all matters and is non-trivial, which is precisely why ecological processes have evolved the way they have. Also, not to nitpick *too* much but hydrocarbons and 'carbos' aren't actually energy, they're potential energy... which is why we use them as food and fuel to release actual energy.

Burning things is bad. No, seriously, we don't have engines that burn clean enough to not produce pollutants.

I'm aware that creating batteries also produces pollutants, but what about aluminum/ceramic super-capacitors? Reusable, Non toxic, recyclable, self preserving (I've trickled slowly increasing amounts of electricity into 25 year old aluminum/ceramic capacitor circuits to bring them back into operation -- the more you use them, the more stable they are). Surely producing and recycling aluminum ca

The fundamental nature of the problem can be understood if you go online and look up "horsepower to kilowatt". Then enter in an example of the HP rating of your favorite small car and see what number pops out.

From the kilowatts listed, you can decide your minimal accepted run time in kilowatt hours, convert that to joules, and find out how many 3000 farad ultracaps you might need. The answer is a gawdawful lot.

Burning things is bad. No, seriously, we don't have engines that burn clean enough to not produce pollutants.

Uhh, no. This is like saying "chemicals are bad" or "radiation is bad". You need to look at what you're burning. The great thing about bio-mass fuels is the concept of "carbon neutral" combustion. You grow a bunch of plants/trees which take carbon -out- of the atmosphere, turn those plants into fuel and a year or so later release the same amount of carbon back into the atmosphere when you burn the fuel. There is no net increase in CO2 levels which means there is no contribution to the greenhouse effect.

Agreed on the approximate CO2 neutrality, which is good, but the particulates (PM2.5s) can be very bad. I'm strongly in favour of adding biomass as (for example) a demand-callable electricity-generation fuel, but we have to pay attention to the PMs which can be hundreds of times higher than natural gas per kWh.

"The taxonomic position of a bacterial strain isolated from the femur of the remains of Jost Lucembursky, margrave in Moravia, Brno (Czech Republic), was investigated by phenotypic, chemotaxonomic and molecular taxonomic methods..."

Because corn isn't food. Maybe hundreds of years ago when native americans were selectively breeding it. Even then, it was kinda crappy, and they had to supplement it carefully with other things or else they would suffer malnutrition. In the 20th century, we've genetically engineered all the nutrients out or corn, making it mostly a source of lousy sugar. Corn is more useful to make fuel and biodegradable plastic than it is as a food.

Tell that to all the people in the world [wikipedia.org] to whom it is a staple. When prices go up, people suffer. Just because you don't think corn ethanol should complete with food production doesn't mean it doesn't compete, here in the real world.

They might actually use the gene to genetically modify aneoribic bacteria and produce biofuels out of rotting wood which will end up as CO2 in the atmosphere either ways!

fungus digests the wood as an energy source. Wood is made up of cellulose and lignin. Cellulose is a carbohydrate and is completely metabolized by the fungus and breaks down into the carbon dioxide and water.
Cellulose ----> carbon dioxide + water